Paul R. Brass

Theft of an idol : text and context in the representation of collective violence

As collective violence erupts in many parts of the world, the media often links this to age-old ethnic or religious hostilities, thereby freeing the state, its agents and its political elites from responsibility. This book encourages readers to look more closely at the issues of violence, ethnicity and the state by focusing on specific instances of violence in their local contexts and questioning the prevailing interpretations of them. Through five case studies of both rural and urban public violence, including police-public confrontations and Hindu-Muslim riots, this book shows how, out of many possible interpretations applicable to these incidents, governments and the media select those that support existing relations of power in state and society. Adopting different modes (narrator, detective and social scientist) Brass treats incidents of collective violence arising intitially out of such common occurences as a drunken brawl, the rape of a woman and the theft of an idol, and demonstrates how some incidents remain localized whilst others are fit into broader frameworks of meaning, thereby becoming useful for upholders of dominant ideologies. He argues that incessant talk about violence and its implications in these circumstances contributes to its persistence rather than to its reduction. Such treatment, he claims, serves in fact to mask the causes of violence, displace the victims from the centre of attention and divert societys gaze from those responsible for its endemic character. He explains how this process ultimately implicates everyone in the perpetuation of systems of violence.

The Political Uses of Crisis: The Bihar Famine of 1966- 1967

In the summer of 1966, Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh provinces in India experienced one of the worst and most widespread droughts and crop failures in the history of the region during the twentieth century. Massive local, national, and international relief efforts were provided to prevent death by starvation on an immense scale. Nevertheless, the seriousness of the situation was only gradually and reluctantly accepted by the agencies, institutions, and governments that were ultimately involved in the relief effort. In order to convey the seriousness of the situation to those in a position to help the people of Bihar, local, state, and national politicians adopted a rhetoric that involved defining the situation as a “crisis” of unprecedented proportions. The Bihar Famine of 1966–1967 illustrates the importance of rhetoric and political definitions in distinguishing crises from “normal” situations and in defining the quantity, timing, and recipients of relief.

National Power and Local Politics in India: A Twenty-year Perspective

THE study of federal political systems, particularly parliamentary or representative federal political systems, such as those in the United States, Canada, or India involves complexities that do not exist in unitary states such as Great Britain or France. In the first place, there are three or more institutional levels in such systems, each of which has its own arena in which political struggles take place. Second, the balance of power among the levels in federal systems varies in different systems and in the same system at different times. Third, the study of the extraparliamentary organizations, such as political parties, and of social movements, also becomes a more complex task since it cannot be assumed that a political party or social movement with the same name is the same sort of formation in New York and Mississippi or in Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Moreover, in federal systems with a high degree of regional cultural diversity, each federal unit in the country may have a distinctive configuration of extraconstitutional political formations and social forces. This is certainly the case in India, the most

The politicization of the peasantry in a North Indian state: II

During the past three decades, the dominant party in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), the Indian National Congress, has undergone a secular decline in its support in state legislative assembly elections. The principal factor in its decline has been its inability to establish a stable basis of support among the middle peasantry, particularly among the so‐called ‘backward castes’, with landholdings ranging from 2.5 to 30 acres. Disaffected from the Congress since the 1950s, these middle proprietary castes, who together form the leading social force in the state, turned in large numbers to the BKD, the agrarian party of Chaudhuri Charan Singh, in its first appearance in UP elections in 1969. They also provided the central core of support for the Janata party in its landslide victory in the 1977 state assembly elections. The politicization of the middle peasantry in this vast north Indian province is no transient phenomenon, but rather constitutes a persistent factor with which all political part...

Introduction: Discourses of Ethnicity, Communalism, and Violence

Increasingly in the twentieth century, though the process began in the nineteenth, the power to define and intepret local incidents of violence, to place them in specific contexts based on local knowledge, has been removed from the local societies in which they occur. Ideologies of protest from Marxism to contemporary feminism and the simultaneous spread of systems of psychiatric, psychological, criminological, and sociological systems of “knowledge” have all produced “authorities” who claim to know better than the people themselves the reasons for acts of common or uncommon violence in everyday life. Events which occur in isolated villages and hamlets or on the city streets have become subject to placement in categories and contexts previously not known to or incidental to the lives of those who experience them.

Elite interests, popular passions, and social power in the language politics of India

Movements for the recognition and official establishment of particular languages in India, among the many hundreds that have been identified and classified by linguists, grammarians, and census takers, have been prominent and recurring features of politics in the subcontinent for a century-and-a-half. These movements have invariably been competitive in character, demanding preference for one, and displacement of other, actual or potential rivals. Further, they have sometimes been associated with hostile and venomous characterizations of both a rival language and its speakers, leading to intercommunal/interethnic violence. Despite the turbulent history of such movements in modern India, viable compromises have been reached concerning the status of the multiplicity of Indian languages and their hierarchical ordering for various purposes. These compromises, however, have profound consequences for the life chances, including the empowerment and disempowerment, of all India’s citizens. These consequences have only recently begun to attract scholarly attention.

Party Systems and Government Stability in the Indian States

This paper contributes to the substantive and methodological discussion of the issues concerning the causes of cabinet instability through analysis of data from Indian state politics. The focus of the analysis is on explaining the duration of Indian state governments in days with variables measuring the degree of fragmentation and cohesion in the party system, the composition of the cabinet, the characteristics of the opposition, and the role of ideological differences. A substantial amount of the variation in the durability of coalition governments is explained with variables that measure the degree of party system institutionalization and the extent of political opportunism, but ideological factors do not explain much of the differences in durability of governments. It is also found that none of the measures used can explain much of the variation in one-party majority governments for which, it is argued, explanations must be sought that focus on leadership skill and on relationships between leaders and factions in a dominant party.

Secularism out of its place

A major source of the problems in recent discussions of the continued relevance to contemporary Indian political life of the secular state and the practices associated with secularism lies in the heavy burden that has been placed upon these terms. Secularism, properly speaking, is an orientation and a set of practices. However, in India, it has become an ideology seen as both contesting with Hindu communalism by those who uphold it, and as contesting against the faith of the Indian peoples by those who lately stand against it. Secularism as an orientation and a set of practices is indispensable to Indias future as a liberal democracy. However, it loses its force as a binding principle of Indian unity if it is transformed into an ideology.

Victims, heroes or martyrs? partition and the problem of memorialization in contemporary Sikh history

Heroism and martyrdom are central values in contemporary Sikh historiography and primary symbols in their collective memory. Both are replete with the stories of numerous heroes and martyrs who faced death, unflinchingly fighting in defense of the Sikh faith and its believers (constituting the Panth or community) against overwhelming odds. Conversely, it is considered shameful for Sikhs to become mere victims, succumbing to attacks against faith and community without fighting to the death. It is also insisted that true Sikhs do not themselves attack those who are weak or harmless; on the contrary true Sikhs come to the defense of such persons even if they are not of the same faith. However, during the last half century, Sikhs have many times become victims, as well as perpetrators of violence, being unable to act in a way consistent with their central values. The consequence has been an inability to integrate their modern history successfully into a narrative consistent with those values and to find appropriate ways of memorializing what has been done to many Sikhs and what many Sikhs have done to others.